A long time ago, in a dev stream far far away, it was discussed how what you want is coming. Well, at least making it so there will be less of a need of multiple crafting stations (and thus more inventory space) Here’s the link, my write up summary for this part is at the very bottom (and it’s time stamped). My hunch (though, its just a hunch) is that we’re going to see those improvements here, real soon. Hunch is courtesy of one Ignasis.
As for your crafting station collision issues, this probably has more to do with performance, then anything believe it or not. The funky graphic buffer you refer to is what is called a collision box, it’s an invisible 3D mesh that tells the game when a player hits an object. Ideally, these collision boxes are low in count in what are called polygons. To make a 3D mesh look realistic or cool or whatever, it takes lots of polygons. Well, the higher the poly count, the more the computer demands. The same goes for collision boxes. They might be invisible, but the computer, or server, or both, still has to process that information. Thus, a lot of times collision boxes are inaccurate to the object in order to try and keep poly counts low. With that said, I’ll add it to my list of things to look at, if nothing else then it’s an extra object that I get to improve on for my Collision Add-On Mod. 